Is Sanskrit still relevant for NLP/AI?
I came across a news article from 2018 where the president of India was saying that Sanskrit is the best language for ML/AI.


A very interesting statement indeed! Globally, there is very little interest in NLP for Sanskrit compared to very many other languages.


  Especially given the fact that humans still have to first learn Sanskrit in case NLP is done in Sanskrit.


Most people would say that NLP tools are meant to cater to the needs of humans, instead of requiring humans to learn a new language to be able to benefit from tools (which is a huge barrier).

To answer your question more clearly, it is not that the research community selects languages for research based on "suitability" of the language. Instead, in general the intention of NLP research is to grapple with problems that are relevant, impact many people - or are funded (unfortunately :-).